This article originally appeared on NAS Talent Talk.

Ann Romney, the GOP candidate’s wife, organizes her family photos there. The U.S. Army recently issued a guide on how to use it. According to sources, it drove more traffic to its website in February 2012 than Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined. 

If you’re out of the loop on what I’m talking about, it’s Pinterest, the third most popular media platform behind Facebook and Twitter.

What started as a passion project for obsessive collector and ex-Google employee Ben Silberman has become an online juggernaut. Pinterest attracts a female-dominated audience of fanatic “pinners” who share their favorite aesthetic images from kitchen decorating ideas to wedding gifts at a pace that is making its rivals do more than sit up and take notice.

One tech biz theorist, David Coursey of Forbes magazine, postulates that Facebook’s motivation for plunking down a cool $1 billion for the photo site Instagram was a blocking maneuver to hopefully steer the Pinterest-minded to an eventual new social component of the always morphing Facebook.

What does this all mean for you? If you’re a brand with a huge female target market, you need to pay attention. Brand heavyweights like Martha Stewart Living and Kate Spade have added, according to gyro marketer Melissa Pitts, “more than 19,000 and 34,000 followers respectively” since adding their presence on Pinterest.

Logical entries like Neiman Marcus and Ann Taylor have jumped in. A less obvious player, such as home improvement chain Lowe’s, is using images of interior design and do-it-yourself gardening projects to attract a wider audience. For the record, Lowe’s saw a 32% jump in followers by adding a Pinterest application to their Facebook page.

Venerable brand Kotex has taken a big leap by launching one of the first campaigns on the Pinterest site which resulted in a nearly 100% response. (You can view it here.)

What should you be thinking about?

If you’re in healthcare trying to reach a core female audience, wouldn’t this site make sense in your strategy?

Trying to diversify the gender ratio in your workforce? Pinterest has the potential to reap enormous benefits in socializing your brand.

The point is you can’t afford to ignore this overwhelming social trend. It’s more than a novelty or, blip on cyber trending reports. Research firm ComScore Inc. reports user rates go from 21 minutes on Twitter and 17 minutes on LinkedIn to 1½ hours on Pinterest.

Recently, Pinterest received a venture capital injection of $37.5 million. Those in the know say the undercurrent theme of Pinterest speaks to the next evolution of social branding. Talking Finger co-founder Bill DeRosa believes it acknowledges that “there’s a human at the end of the buying decision.” You might say it represents the increasing “humanization of commerce.”

I’m not inferring you pin all your hopes on attracting certain candidates through Pinterest. But as part of a fully explored strategy, it’s hard to picture a totally integrated game plan without at least considering the power of .